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Month: January 2015

Dr. James David Manning runs Harlem’s Atlah Worldwide Church. He’s also very concerned about Barack Obama sending African-Americans back to Africa in this bizarrely hilarious video from 2012.

Why? He doesn’t really say. Perhaps to solve America’s economic problems, and crime problems, and industrial problems, as this pastor – who is, I must point out, is black – believes. But he does reveal that Obama is working with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros* and Bill Clinton to send all black people to Haiti or western Africa. And that Obama is the son of Satan.

“When we go back to Africa, Al Sharpton will be the President. TD Jakes will be your President.”

You’d think the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the countries of West Africa might object, but I’m sure Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is fine with it.

And holy shit, is it intense. “PRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. MAYBE WE CAN STAY IN AMERICA. MAYBEEEEEEEEE!”

But the really hilarious part is the sudden change of tone about five minutes and thirty seconds in. He leaps from fire-and-brimstone preacher to morning show meteorologist in seconds. It’s almost like it was an act or something!

Conspiracy theorists believe that pop culture is a distraction. From what? From what they believe, of course! If only people focused more on your personal movement and not pop songs, then everyone would agree with you and a true revolution could rise!

This line of thinking is not limited to conspiracy theorists, but to political movements of all stripes. If only the people stopped listening to celebrities, and started listening to you, then we’d just be moments away from a widespread conservative/communist/libertarian revolution!

And foremost among distractions is SPORTS. And a video called “FIXED ENTERTAINMENT Sports is a religion used to keep the stupid sheep asleep” (oh, how I love the deranged stream-of-consciousness names of conspiracy videos!) lays out why.

The following video didn’t gain much traction on r/conspiracy, with just 66% upvoting it. And it lays out the case against sports:

“What’s going on, Youtube?”

You insulting Eagles fans by displaying that image the whole video. Haven’t they suffered enough? I mean, they live in Philadelphia.

“This video is about sports only…”

ZHIB RHAN, BRINGING YOU THE BEST SPORTS TALK ON YOUTUBE! GET READY FOR SOME HOT TAKES

“How disgusted I am with sports…”

I agree, I was pretty disgusted with sports late Sunday afternoon for some reason.

“I also want to talk about Robinson Canó, who just recently signed a very big contract with the Seattle Mariners…”

Zhib Rhan hates Robinson Canó. He stands for all that is wrong with sports, and he’s disgusted that people are fans of this guy (to be sure, I know nothing about him; maybe he is eminently hateable).

But what he really hates are sports fans. Those pathetic louts who just watch millionaires throw a ball around, dreaming of getting the autographs of people they don’t even know.

“You’ll sit in packed baseball stadiums to watch these millionaires who don’t give two shits about you.”

Why are you watching a movie!? Millionaires, paid to pretend to be people? PATHETIC.

Why are you reading Harry Potter!? IT’S NOT EVEN REAL. JK Rowling doesn’t care about you!

You’ll sit in a packed theater watching someone who doesn’t care about you sing? They’re not singing to you! That’s pathetic!

“…hope you can get a jersey that you paid two, three hundred dollars for signed. But yet I’M the crazy one, but some of the same people who do that are the ones who want to point the finger at me that I’m crazy. No, no, YOU’RE CRAZY.”

I’m not crazy. You’re crazy for engaging in an activity that is mainstream! This rant brought to you by 2003-era Livejournal entries and Hot Topic t-shirts.

Perhaps you’re called crazy because your other videos include: “Beware of Satans children masquerading as TI’s, reptilians/greys, phony goddesses all over youtube”, “Paul Walker murdered by the Illuminati fast and furiously”, “Miley Cyrus is an illuminati controlled sex slave”, “Winner takes Earth mind controlled morons in black with E.U. inverted triangle”, and “Fake snow that doesn’t melt? lets have a look at a simple experiment”.

“The biggest of the losers are…”

The Chicago Cubs? The Jacksonville Jaguars? English penalty takers?

“…the people who deal with sports talk radio and ESPN.”

Sadly, he isn’t calling out the eminently hateable ESPN. Just the fans who call in with their own dumb hot takes.

“Those MORONS, who only wish they knew how to play sports, who were never good enough, who are only good enough to blab on the radio like they know everything.”

Wait, he’s railing against people who weren’t good enough to play sports? Is this a jock criticizing sports as a DISTRACTION? Normally that seems to be the domain of those picked last in gym class.

“Sports is what keeps people dumbed down in this country, that’s not the only thing, but it’s one of the main tools to dumb you down and keep you asleep…you people are broke, you’re losing your homes, your money’s being devalued, and yet you support these millionaires.”

And there it goes.

Sports keep you from caring about anything else. The people just aren’t as brilliant as Zhib Rhan: they literally can’t pay attention to sports and anything else. They wouldn’t even notice that they were losing their own homes if it wasn’t for Zhib Rhan brilliantly pointing this out to the sheeple with his brilliant brilliance.

The most popular sports league in the United States takes up one day of the week. One day out of seven. Your team only plays sixteen regular season games and up to four playoff games. It takes up a few hours on Sunday and maybe one game a season on Monday or Thursday night to follow your team. Even if you watch every game of a team’s 82-game NHL or NBA season, that’s two or three hours at night – no different from watching TV, or going to a movie, or going out for dinner or any number of entertainment options you have at 8/7 PM.

Do some people care about sports too much? Yes. Does it take up too much of their lives? For a minority, yes. But for the majority of people, sports are not a distraction from caring about other things. It’s just one more thing they care about.

Of all kinds of millionaires, athletes and celebrities are the most harmless. They’re not nearly as rich as businesspeople, and when a movie fails it doesn’t risk collapsing the economy or causing you to lose your house. Many do admirable charity work. In fact, American athletes’ salaries are artificially deflated by salary cap rules. It’s not like they’re racist slum lords or something variously terrible; that’s their employers, whose high paychecks are obviously on the level.

“That’s why you support deadbeats like Robinson Canó, and there’s plenty of other ones…”

Plenty of other ones! He won’t tell you their names, but be aware that they’re out there. But he will tell you that all athletes fuck prostitutes throughout the season.

Zhib Rhan doesn’t watch sports anymore. He used to play them, but he doesn’t waste his time on millionaires who don’t care about him.

“Games kids play in the street for free…these are kids games!”

Every time one of these people goes on a rant about sports, statements like this are dropped like they’re incredible truth bombs, enlightening sports fans to things they never considered before.

Zhib Rhan also believes that sports are fixed. He made a more in-depth video on this theory, but it’s ten fucking minutes long so I will never get to hear it.

“Sports has to be fixed, for these guys to make the kind of money they make…you have to pay people this kind of money to shut them up.”

What?

ALL SPORTS ARE FIXED, according to him. One wonders why the NBA fixed it so that the Knicks, one of their most high-profile teams, would go over three decades without a championship whilst awarding multiple championships on the relatively unpopular San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons. Or why the NHL would ensure that hockey-mad Canada goes 20 years without a championship.

“That’s why when children play you don’t have a umpire or referee, but when there’s big money involved there’s referees and umpires.”

Is this a Sacramento fan still angry about the 2002 Western Conference Finals? Referees only exist to fake games…but I thought the players were in on it and needed to be shut up? Now it’s just the referees and umpires fixing it?

And God, imagine being picked to play referee as a child.

“It’s a billion dollar business…”

Sports? Are business? They make? Money? Thank you for enlightening my simple brain with this devastating secret.

“For most people in America, sports is their religion!”

Sports isn’t a belief system of any kind, nor is it a way of seeing or making sense of the world. But people obsess over it so it’s a religion, goddamnit!

“You people are insane. Supporting these millionaires that don’t give a damn about you…”

But enough about the Republican Party!

Let’s look at the Reddit comments.

Don’t let yourself sit idly while others manipulate your emotions! Don’t watch movies, or TV shows, or listen to music, or play video games! Don’t ever engage in any form of popular culture to keep your emotions PURE from MANIPULATION.

There’s a lot more to it than grown men scowling at foolish boy games – there’s the whole history of amateurism vs professionalism that led to the Olympics amateurism and the split between rugby codes, which was marked by class. But it certainty wasn’t a plot by “the powers that be”.

This blog has been quiet so far this year, but not for lack of material. Just CRUSHING DESPAIR.

The Charlie Hebdo attacks prompted the usual cries of “FALSE FLAG!” from the top minds of r/conspiracy. It also inspired the usual antisemitism.

The top voted post about the attacks this month was…this cartoon:

How does this relate to the attack? Because Charlie Hebdo once fired a cartoonist for making an antisemitic joke, and r/conspiracy is obsessed with it: of the top 25 posts this month, three out of four posts dealing with the Charlie Hebdo attacks were about the cartoonist fired over antisemitism.

But maybe they’re just really concerned about freedom of speech. After all, the r/conspiracy crowd rarely says anything about Jews. They just think there’s a Zionist conspiracy, not a –

r/isrconspiracyracist‘s users have discovered that certain users, like the terribly named Antiochus88, will post antisemitic videos or links – but swap out “Jew” for “Zionist” in the post’s title. They are interchangeable to this crowd.

I am not cherrypicking any examples of r/conspiracy being terrible; I’m just looking at what their users upvoted in the last week.

There are entries about the attack being a false flag. Guess what nation they blame?

The link goes to an International Business Times article – that’s been retracted for being erroneous.

The theory du jour: Israel ordered the attack in retribution for France potentially recognizing Palestine. One wonders why there were no strikes on Sweden, or Iceland, or the 133 other countries across the world that actually recognize Palestine.

The top 25 posts this week contain four posts about murdered or jailed Palestinian journalists and cartoonists; one post about Israelis plotting to blow up the Mexican parliament in 2001 (more on that later); two posts on a French comedian banned from performing due to his antisemitic act; and three more posts about various instances of Israeli censorship.

To be fair, some of these are valid concerns. The murder or arrest of journalists is abhorrent anywhere. Accepting any kind of racism is hypocritical. But if they were focused on the rights of journalists, they’d probably be talking about more than just abuses in Palestine. Many people have pointed out the anti-journalist actions of the world leaders who attended the Paris march. There is no reason to focus on Israel – they had nothing to do with the attacks, and their leaders were just one of many to attend the Paris march. There is a reason they’re so focused on these incidents specifically.

The Mexico story, it turns out, does not involve two Israelis plotting to blow up Mexico’s Parliament. It involves one Israeli and one Mexican Jew – since, again, these words are interchangeable to this crowd and attacking “Israelis” makes them seem not quite so antisemitic. This story never caught on with the mainstream media, another sign of their bias against stories that aren’t true. But one user explains why the media ignored it:

Though I sadly didn’t screencap it, for a time every other link on r/conspiracy’s main page was about Israel, Jews or “Zionists” – in response to an event that did not involve Israel, and where Jewish people were inarguably victims (the kosher market attack, far as I can tell, went unmentioned). And among them was this entry:

They’re not saying Jews did 9/11, they’re just saying some Jews were adjacent to 9/11!

If you can discern anything from this blog post, I salute you. I just gave up when I saw that it descends into one gigantic block halfway through.

r/conspiracy is a goddamn cesspool, home to edgy 17 year olds (I hope, but I sadly think a lot of these people are much older) whose knowledge of the world derives from South Park and obscure blogs. And they think they’re smarter than everyone else because of this. They’re proud of their ignorance. In their minds, they’re better than you because they draw their entire worldview from nonsense.

Hating Jews lets them be edgy and shocking, but it’s also what they believe: r/whiterights’ userbase overlaps with r/conspiracy, and the most visible members, at least until 3 months ago, included “Antiochus88” – named after a historical oppressor of Jews and a code for “Heil Hitler”, respectively. r/conspiracy is big with the Stormfront crowd. And so r/conspiracy continues to lash out at “Zionists” and Israel and sometimes, when they don’t bother to disguise it, Jews. It’s impossible to tell who’s just parroting what they hear and who earnestly believes it, and it doesn’t matter. Both followers and leaders march against Jews in Germany. Both followers and leaders vandalize synagogues. Both chant “Jew, France is not for you”.

Of course, that’s not to say that the users of r/conspiracy engage in such behavior. The only thing more powerful than their racism is their slacktivism.

"Look, you may be new here, but /r/conspiracy is where many top minds collaborate, and routinely outsmart the most well funded, well equipped and diabolical organizations on earth. How do we do it? Top thinkers, experts on every field, unparalleled investigative skills and fearlessness. I would trust a top comment here over pretty much any news source, especially a mainstream source, any day."